After
last summer's campaign for the right to walk bare-breasted through public
parks, you might be forgiven for concluding that radical feminists wouldn't
object to the exposure of naked female bodies in glossy magazines.
You'd be wrong.

Starting
next month, you'll have the opportunity to witness a protracted morality
play on the subject, at the expense of Ontario taxpayers and a few unfortunate
individuals. The cast will include two troubled women, three sets
of convenience store owners, and a Board of Inquiry appointed by the Ontario
Human Rights Commission.

In
April, 1988, the women filed complaints with the Human Rights Commission
alleging that the mere presence of magazines such as Playboy, Penthouse
and Hustler in three Toronto convenience stores created a negative, hostile
environment for women and therefore discriminated against them because
of their sex.

With
the almost legendary backlog of cases facing the Commission, one might
have thought that a complaint this silly and tenuous would get short shrift.
But no, the employees of the Commission took it all very seriously.
(Maybe this explains their backlog.)

There
are so many things wrong with this picture that it's hard to know where
to start.

Even
if you accept the complainants' disputable contention that pornography
is demeaning to women, it still requires prodigious linguistic and logical
contortions to make this complaint fit within the realm of the Human Rights
Code.

The
code gives every person "a right to equal treatment with respect to services,
goods and facilities, without discrimination because of...sex... ."
If the women had been denied the opportunity to enter the stores or purchase
skin magazines, then they might validly have hollered, "Discrimination!"
In fact, though, they received exactly the same treatment as anyone else:
they were free to buy the magazines, or to ignore them and get on with
their shopping, or to flounce out and shop elsewhere. Where's the
discrimination?

Consider
next the plight of the store owners who were unfortunate enough to be located
in the neighbourhood of these troubled women. They're not the only
stores in Ontario who sell girlie magazines, but they're the ones who are
stuck with defending themselves in an anticipated 30- to 40-day hearing.
If they're cleared of discrimination charges, will they get costs?
Not likely. The complainants won't be paying for the lawyers on their
side, of course. The taxpayers--including the store owners--will.
It's a no-lose proposition for the women, and a no-win proposition for
the stores.

In
fact, after five years with this hanging over their heads, it's amazing
that these heroic folks haven't quietly caved in, removed the magazines
from their shelves and paid the women some hush money. Anyone who
believes in freedom and property rights should thank them for not saddling
us with such a precedent.

Peter
Israel, counsel for one set of store owners, expects the factual evidence
to take less than two hours. We can surmise that the remaining 30
days of the Commission's case will consist of expert testimony "proving"
that the magazines are demeaning to women and create a poisoned environment.

What
will the standard of proof be? Do the magazines have to offend all
women, or a majority, or some other percentage? If unanimity is the
test, they might as well call the whole thing off right now. There
is clearly a substantial contingent of women who don't share those feelings--namely,
women who buy the magazines, female store owners who sell them, women such
as Christie Hefner who publish them, and of course the women whose photographs
appear in them (who compete energetically for this opportunity to demean
themselves all the way to the bank).

There
are also women like me, who believe that women are all unique individuals,
as different from each other as we are from men. We are not living
inside a science fiction story. We are not cordless mobile operating
units dispatched by some giant central brain called Woman. Even if
I believed that some particular photograph were undignified or insulting
to the woman shown in it, what does that have to do with me? I am
not that woman. She is not me. How am I demeaned by that picture
any more than her brother or her uncle are?

Radical
feminists argue that women who enjoy, produce or even tolerate pornography
have been so brainwashed by a male-dominated society that their apparent
consent is invalid. Feminists try to relegate their female opponents
to the legal status of infants or mental incompetents: benighted persons
in need of protection. They never explain how they themselves withstood
the cultural onslaught and learned to think independently. They refuse
to grant the possibility that women who disagree with them might also be
thinking independently.

Author
Wendy McElroy, writing recently in Liberty magazine, answered this argument
beautifully: "The touchstone principle of feminisim used to be, `a
woman's body, a woman's right.' Regarding date rape, feminists declare,
`No means no.' The logical corollary is `Yes means yes.' Now,
modern feminists are declaring that `yes' means nothing. It is difficult
to believe that any form of pornography could be more degrading to women
than this attitude."